“Eastern Ghouta is the phobia of President Bashar al-Assad,” says Wissam al-Khatib, a 27-year-old activist from the suburb of Arbin.

Over the past six years, the region’s rebel groups have withstood numerous attempts by the government to retake the area. Despite relentless bombardment, more than five years of siege and a number of chemical attacks, including a sarin gas attack that killed between 355 and 558 people in 2013, some 400,000 civilians remained in the area.

As the war enters its eighth year, the opposition’s control on the area is now waning. Over the past month, pro-government forces have captured 70 percent of the area and divided the region into three encircled pockets. The operation has already killed more than 1,200 people and tens of thousands of others have fled the fighting in the single largest exodus of civilians from Eastern Ghouta since 2013.

Reports about yet another chlorine gas attack on Douma, besieged eastern Ghouta. These attacks are so common now & media activists & hospitals are struggling to function, so at times I learn about such attacks from ordinary civilians.

Retaking Eastern Ghouta would be the latest in a string of government victories over the past two years. It would entrench Assad’s hold over most of Syria’s urban centres – including the Syrian coast and a large strip of territory stretching from Damascus north through Homs and Hama to Aleppo. It would also spell the single greatest loss for opposition forces since the government recaptured Eastern Aleppo at the end of 2016.

“If Ghouta falls that means the regime has grabbed the snake by the head,” says al-Khatib. “It means Assad will retake the entire country.”

While it won’t spell the end of the war, experts and anti-government activists say that Eastern Ghouta is one of the most definitive fronts in a conflict that has killed more than 350,000 people and displaced over half of Syria’s pre-war population.

“[The late Syrian president] Hafez al-Assad firmly believed that whoever controlled the Damascus region, controlled all of Syria,” says Fabrice Balanche, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “With the fall of East Ghouta, Assad will once again be the master of the entire country.”

The Last Stand

Eastern Ghouta, however, is not the last opposition-held enclave in Syria. Rebel groups still command a patchwork of territory in Syria’s north and south, including significant strongholds such as Idlib province and parts of Syria’s southernmost province of Daraa.

According to Balanche, however, the government’s fierce campaign in the Damascus suburbs has sent a stark message to rebels in other parts of Syria: There is no hope for the Syrian opposition.

The recapture of the rebel bastion will deal a “psychological” blow to Syria’s embattled and divided opposition forces, who have lost all significant international backing, he said.

This will particularly impact rebels in less defendable holdouts such as the Rastan district in Homs and the Dumayr district, northeast of Damascus, pushing them to seek out negotiations with the government to avoid the fate of the Damascus countryside, Balanche said.

For Abu Ahmad, a 26-year-old activist from Kafr Batna, Eastern Ghouta is unlike any other rebel bastion.

“Eastern Ghouta has always been at the heart of revolutionary struggles in Syria,” he says.

In the 1930s it was the main battleground for patriotic struggles when Syrian nationalists chose it as a base to launch attacks against French occupation forces. With the start of anti-government protests in 2011, Eastern Ghouta quickly became an arena of anti-regime demonstrations and, eventually, one of the first areas to fall outside government control.

Unlike opposition enclaves in Idlib and Daraa, Eastern Ghouta has maintained its distance from the international power struggle over Syria, Abu Ahmad said.

“Today, Idlib is a Turkish zone of control. The south is protected by the U.S.,” he says. “Eastern Ghouta, however, is one of the last arenas of a real civil war,” he added.

Though rebels in Eastern Ghouta have allegedly received support and orders from foreign powers, specifically Saudi Arabia and Qatar, throughout the course of the conflict, this has not translated into a large-scale foreign presence on the ground. This is not the case in Idlib, for example, where Turkish troops and allied rebels control a strip of territory near the Turkish border.

In Daraa, various foreign powers – including Washington, Jordan and Israel – have vested interests in protecting local rebel groups. The southern province is the only region in Syria to be protected by a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal. Unlike other de-escalation zones in Syria, which were designated as part of an agreement between Russia, Iran and Turkey, the southern deal is the result of an agreement solely between Moscow and Washington.

Both Idlib and Daraa are under some form of de-escalation agreement; however, government forces have recently attacked both provinces. This heightened the international community’s concerns that fierce battles will soon break out in the opposition bastions after operations in the Eastern Ghouta region subside.

Last Monday, the U.S. State Department expressed concern over reports of government airstrikes in Daraa and called for an “urgent meeting” in Jordan to ensure compliance with the de-escalation zone agreement. Speaking to Reuters, an unidentified official warned that, if true, this alleged cease-fire violation “broadens the conflict.”

“I may say this because I am from East Ghouta. But for me, if the region falls to Assad, then that would mark the end of the Syrian revolution,” says al-Khatib.

“We will have lost to the armies of the world.”

While the majority of rebel-held parts of Syria become arenas of an international struggle between a vast array of foreign forces, the fall of Eastern Ghouta for some activists would spell the end of the original battle between the government and the opposition.

This article originally appeared on Syria Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about the war in Syria, you can sign up to the Syria email list. Photograph courtesy of the Working Families Party. Published under a Creative Commons license.

But first of all I must tell you that what you learn today may surprise, shock and even horrify you. I ask only this: listen and try and reserve judgement until you have had a chance to process what you hear. This will not be easy.

What I can say is that you are not the first group to have gone through this ordeal. These seminars have been run, once a year or more, since 1945. They are held across the world, in many tongues, in many societies. And I can tell you that no one who has taken part has refused the commitment we asked of them.

In fact, you already know people who have gone through the seminar. Not only have they never breathed a word about what transpires here, they did not back out afterwards. If you are sitting in this room, you have been chosen by one of our alumni as being worthy of being here. You have also been judged and tested, without your knowledge, for years. You have been marked for future greatness.

Being here is an honour. Remember that.

So let’s start with who I am. Officially I am a mid-level civil servant, with a job title so vague as to be meaningless. What I really am is a member of a committee. A committee so obscure that it has no name. A committee whose influence is inversely proportional to its visibility.

To be a member of this committee is a privilege and a burden. That burden is one of secrecy. I am confident that you can take on the weight of the secret that I am about to tell you – that is why you have been observed so closely, after all – but what we require of you is more than just being silent. The secret we pass on to you has to be lived, incorporated into your very soul, as though it was not there at all.

You are all men and women who have chosen to be cogs in the great machine of government. I’m sure you will have observed that when government works well, no one notices it. This isn’t always possible of course. Sometimes we make mistakes or our political masters make unwise choices. When that happens, we have to pick up the pieces in the full glare of public scrutiny. Not pleasant of course, but the scrutiny always dies down eventually and we go on with our efficiently invisible work.

The secret I am revealing to you today is not like any other secret with which you have been entrusted. If it were ever revealed there would be no going back; we would not recover and we would not fade back into invisibility. You will never – ever – be able to let your guard down, to make simple mistakes or even reveal that you have a secret in the first place.

What is this secret? It will sound remarkably mundane at first. I apologise for the anti-climax. It’s simply this:

There are several million people in the world that no one knows about.

Or to put it even more prosaically: If you combined every census of the population of every country, the total would be several million short of the total number of people in the world.

Or to put it in terms that are relevant to your own work: In this country there are about 250,000 people who are deliberately not counted in the census and who, officially, simply do not exist.

I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.

Is the full impact of this disparity dawning yet? Well here is what it means: Almost every set of official figures have been deliberately falsified. GDP, tax revenues, population estimates, school rolls, electors – every figure that we in government rely on is inaccurate. And it is us, the committee and the invisible college of bureaucrats into which you are being inducted, who have perpetuated this fraud since 1945, completely undetected.

There are, in effect, two governments. One, the government you have been working in until today, governs on the basis of one set of figures. The other, the government you are now joining, doctors the figures on which the first relies.

I’m sure you appreciate the complexity and difficulty of this task, but please do not be too intimidated. While a small fraction of the size of the official government, our secret government is still sizeable. We have been doing this for a long long time, and we are very very good at it.

We are also not alone in this work. Our country is one of many that host a portion of the secret millions. Each one has its shadow government. While they work differently according to local custom, we all support each other. We are, by now, virtuosos of invisible fraud.

Now I see on our faces that some of you are ahead of me. You know what is coming. Have you been spending time in the darker corners of the internet? Of course, you have! Civil servants are human too.

Yes, it is Jews we are hiding. The Holocaust did not happen. We are the ones whose perpetual task it is to cover up the continuing existence of millions of unkilled Jews and their descendants. The deniers are right, it was all a hoax. Of course, they can’t explain how millions of Jews suddenly disappeared from sight. They have no inkling about us. It’s ironic really. Their crude antisemitism made them assume that something was not right with the official narrative, but their evidence is fraudulent. They know nothing of the real conspiracy.

For we are not Jews. Nor are we their servants. Quite the reverse. One of the things that we checked before we recruited you is that you had not the slightest trace of Jewish blood, no Jewish friends, not even a fling with a Jewish girl or boy at university!

This is for us, not for them.

Some of the Jews know of course; they have their own committees. We communicate, we collaborate, but we are separate. They have their agenda and we have ours.

I will leave most the ‘how’ of the secret for the speakers who follow me at this seminar. What’s important right now is that you understand the ‘why’.

The truth is, we cannot live together. They know it and we know it. If you are honest with yourselves, you know it too. It’s simply never worked. Everywhere Jews have lived there has been trouble. Either they stick out too much or fit in too well. They want too much, from themselves and from the rest of us. I don’t hate them for this – and neither should you – I simply accept it as an unfortunate fact.

Just because the Holocaust was a hoax doesn’t mean that the rest of the conspiracy theories are correct. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a fraud, Jews did not kill Christian children to drink their blood and the Rothschilds are just a successful banking dynasty. Jews do not, and never have, ruled the world. They are not monsters, just ordinary people of a type with whom we cannot live.

The secret into which you are being inducted represents the ongoing fulfilment of a great project that began in the early nineteenth century. That was the time of emancipation when Jews in Europe became citizens in the modern world. For the most far-sighted Jews and the most far-sighted non-Jews, it was clear from the start that it was never going to work. They got together to discuss the problem: at the beginning in salons, coffee houses and taverns, then as discussions grew more serious, in universities and parliaments. These discussions were always discreet, always civil and eventually they were productive.

The conclusion these pioneers came to was, in retrospect, obvious: The Jews needed a home, somewhere away from Europe, somewhere where they could live amongst themselves. On that, they agreed. But how? In deference to your education, I will assume you know what Zionism is and when Israel came into being. What you don’t know is how much of an involvement we non-Jews had in its success. Most Jews, most Zionists, never knew the agreements that had been hashed out in secret meetings across Europe. They organised themselves, raised the money and settled the land on their own – we rarely lifted a finger to support them. That wasn’t our role.

Our job was to help the process on its way. It became clear pretty early on that most Jews didn’t want to go to the promised land without being pushed. It also became clear that the existing residents of Palestine were going to kick up a fuss about their new neighbours.

What we needed was a cataclysm. A cataclysm so great that the world would recognise a Jewish state and the Jews would flock to it. The problem was that no country wanted to carry out such a cataclysm. And in any case, no Jew would accept such a death toll.

There was an impasse. After a century of fruitful collaboration, no progress could be made. At that point, in the first decades of the twentieth century, beset by other conflagrations, our predecessors lost patience. They forced a deal on the Jews: Life would become so unbearable for them that they would have no choice but to leave.

In essence, the Jews were offered a choice: Either a fake Holocaust or a real one. Understandably, they chose the former.

It took decades to set up. As the world divided into belligerent blocs, so the collaboration continued. Small, select circles of democrats, fascists and communists set aside their grievances for a greater purpose. Amidst the bloodbath that was now unavoidable, the Jews would disappear, and a story would be told to replace them.

You know the story from here. The details of how it happened have never been recorded and never will be. What is left are fragments: whispered stories of ships leaving Danzig bound for ports unknown under Soviet air cover, holding camps on remote Atlantic islands, new identities given to bewildered ostjuden.

I confess that I cannot imagine how the relocated Jews survived their new lives. Did they not, as they watched the newsreels of Belsen feel the urge to scream out “No, we are still here?” They were told to hide their Jewishness, to have no contact with their co-religionists who already lived in the host countries. I am in awe of their discipline, their collective desire to keep to the bargain.

And we kept our bargain and they kept theirs. They got their state and we committed to getting rid of 6 million Jews without killing them.

The unkilled secret Jews and their descendants are still leaving our countries and being channelled to Israel. It’s been slower work than we anticipated, and harder. At first, the idea was to send all the millions of Jews that were supposed to have been killed by the Nazis directly to Israel. That would never have worked. Aside from the transport problems in wartime, the arrival of millions would have been impossible to disguise. So the Jews were shared out, to our country and others. Their leaders made sure they never talked, and they were slowly removed to Israel over decades. The process is yet to be completed. Maybe you will be the last generation who has to keep the secret, maybe not.

You may ask what we got from this deal. Has it all been worth it? I have no answer to that. I suppose we owed them a state for all the persecution we inflicted on them in the past. There is something extraordinary about them isn’t there? We cannot live alongside them so we go to immense lengths to remove them – and by God do they make a success of it! I cannot help but wonder whether they got the better end of the deal. Here we are, condemned to decades of statistical gerrymandering. Here they are, with a powerful and prosperous state. Of course, Israel also has to hide its true population too, but they somehow do it with style. I’ve met some of their secret keepers, and I cannot help comparing their confident insolence with the drudgery of our stoic labours.

Well, we are where we are. There is no option but to perpetuate the secret. Can you imagine the disaster if the world found out that almost every government in the world had a shadow government? The earth would totter on its axis.

One day, when all the unkilled Jews and their progeny have left for Israel, there will be no need to continue the fraud. All that will be left will be to guard the story. Eventually, not even that.

Until then, it is your duty and your obligation to keep on with the work. We have no choice, and now you have no choice. I won’t belabour this point. Suffice it to say that you are now bound by obligations that will be released only on death, and if you shoulder the burden as you should, that will not be for a long while.

Welcome, then, to the seminar. I cannot resist closing with an ancient text that a Jewish secret-keepers once quoted at me at one of our interminable meetings. He was, I think, mocking me, but that doesn’t take away the power and relevance of these words:

“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. Published under a Creative Commons license.

When television shows I care about are in the middle of a new season, I find myself balancing precariously between my habitual impulse to stay current online with my powerful desire not to know what happens in the latest episodes until I can sit down and watch them properly.

This is a common predicament in a world where so much of our input comes from people we are not able to communicate with directly. The more that the Internet has become the foundation of everyday interaction — so much so, some would argue, that it is no longer perceptible as the Internet anymore — the more such problems of mediation preoccupy us.

Every day, we navigate situations in which some people have more knowledge than others, whether they realize it or not. The ability to figure out who is in possession of particular information and who is not frequently represents the difference between success and failure in a vast range of endeavours.

Most commentators have focused on the extent to which knowledge translates into power. Corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are able to leverage the vast amounts of data at their disposal to vanquish potential rivals and secure political advantages. And individuals who have privileged access to information also benefit in all sorts of ways.

What interests me more, though, is not this long-term structural asymmetry, which tends to become increasingly pronounced over time, but the more fluid and temporary sort that is absorbing increasing amounts of ordinary people’s time and energy. While our engagement with popular entertainment might not be as significant as other aspects of our existence, it is coming to serve as a proving ground for the information society, helping us seek out what you might call “micro-advantages” and compensate for the corollary lack of information that sometimes confronts us.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this new relationship with culture is how rapidly it is becoming second-nature. Both online and in person, those who can afford to spend time and money on amusing themselves now spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out both what they have in common with other individuals and where that shared experience diverges.

You can’t just declare yourself to be a fan of a television series or a band; you have to make it clear exactly how far along you are on the timeline of that particular fandom. While behaving politely might no longer require knowledge of your interlocutors’ class position, it frequently demands a precise understanding of their cultural standing: where they are up to speed, where they lag behind, and where they haven’t even entered the race.

In order to tease out the implications of this state of affairs, I’m going to extrapolate from my own recent experience with this problem of information differentials. Now, I realize that not everyone, even those with whom I have a great deal in common, behaves the way I’m about to describe. My own daughter has a habit of reading novels from back to front because she is frequently more interested in figuring out how the plot is constructed than in “feeling along” with its characters.

And, to state the obvious, there are far too many people who simply don’t have the privilege required to worry about what happens in fictional narratives. Nevertheless, I am confident, based on years of interacting with people in person and on the internet, that a lot of them share the concerns I have, both about being ahead of others and about being behind them.

It is reasonable for me to request that someone I see all the time steer clear of spoilers. But on a social media platform in which I see posts from hundreds of friends each day, this level of control is impossible. I can’t expect each and every one of them to customize their privacy settings just because of me. All I can hope is that they will be respectful of the fact that not everyone in their feed will be as up-to-speed in a particular fandom as they are. In my experience, though, it is almost inevitable that a few of my friends on social media will fail to be circumspect.

I’m not talking about the sort who derive perverse delight from ruining things for others. Although some parts of the internet are dominated by those individuals’ misanthropy, my feed is almost entirely free of their noxious presence. If my friends reveal spoilers, it’s either because they are not well versed in online etiquette or, more commonly, because the urge to share in the virtual conversation about a popular show is too strong to resist.

Predictably, this latter problem seems to be most acute with precisely those series for which I wish to avoid premature revelations. That’s why I frequently find myself taking a break from all social media, whether for a few hours or even a few days. I am willing to be temporarily ignorant about all the latest news in order to prevent myself from inadvertently acquiring too much information about things I care about.

With all these Filters to block Kardashian’s & Movie Spoilers,can we Get a Twitter Filter to remove Bad Fans? Please @Twitter ? Sincerely,Tired of this Shitpic.twitter.com/3SF6XinLQY

I realize that this is hardly the sort of pressing problem that world leaders need to address. Who, ultimately, cares whether my experience of Game of Thrones is diminished because I find out that a character I love is going to die in the episode I have yet to watch? Although I try hard to avoid spoilers – I even avoid reviews of record albums I’ve been looking forward to – I also recognize that they rarely “spoil” a television series, book, or film all that much.

What interests me, rather, is the amount of energy I nevertheless expend compartmentalizing both my knowledge and my ignorance, because not only do I try hard to avoid spoilers, I try just as hard to avoid spoiling things for others. And, as I noted earlier, I know that I’m hardly alone in doing so.

To be sure, the asymmetrical distribution of information is not a new problem for culture. Back when Charles Dickens was releasing his novels in instalments, the advantage readers in England had over English-speakers in current and former colonies was such a big deal that people wondered how the electric telegraph might transform the publishing industry. Even now, films are not usually released simultaneously around the world, guaranteeing that the capacity to spoil is often a function of geography. And works that are not readily available in electronic form, such as the blockbuster Broadway musical Hamilton, demonstrate the persistent importance of what Walter Benjamin called the “aura”.

Today, however, these more traditional differentials, which are relatively stable and easy to perceive, are complemented by a rapidly expanding network of ones that flicker into existence so briefly that they can be almost impossible to register. While both are a function of who has access to a work and when they achieve it, the question of how long that access confers an advantage looms increasingly large. To this extent, at least, the domain of cultural capital now operates much like that of financial capital, generating so much information so quickly that it can no longer be tracked with the naked eye.

When we try to discern trends these days, the distance between the averages that communicate them and the raw data that those averages distil is wider than ever before. And because more and more people have at least a vague sense of this gap, the validity of those trends is increasingly suspect. Even if we acknowledge that they roughly correlate to impressions we’ve personally had, it’s hard not to think that the most valuable insights are lurking somewhere in the data in ways we cannot yet comprehend.

I believe that it is primarily awareness of this crisis that is motivating many of us to expend so much time and energy on seemingly inconsequential tasks like avoiding spoilers. We know that there is power in what we know, of course, but also that there is power in what we know we don’t know and find ways to conduct experiments in that paradoxical territory.

Although I do not have time to explore it here, the great Marxist thinker Raymond Williams’ distinction between residual, dominant, and emergent formations could help to shed light on all this. At a time when backwardness and advancement are coming to be measured in days instead of decades and seconds instead of hours, making productive use of both the cultural capital we have and the cultural capital we lack is perhaps the most urgent task before us.

Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Speaking generally, Communism is the ideal of human equality and brotherhood. It considers the exploitation of man by man as the source of all slavery and oppression. It holds that economic inequality leads to social injustice and is the enemy of moral and intellectual progress. Communism aims at a society where classes have been abolished as a result of common ownership of the means of production and distribution. It teaches that only in a classless commonwealth can man enjoy liberty, peace and well-being.

My purpose is to compare Communism with its application in Soviet Russia, but on closer examination, I find it an impossible task. As a matter of fact, there is no Communism in the USSR. Not a single Communist principle, not a single item of its teaching is being applied by the Communist Party there.

To some this statement may appear as entirely false; others may think it vastly exaggerated. Yet I feel sure that an objective examination of conditions in present-day Russia will convince the unprejudiced reader that I speak with entire truth.

It is necessary to consider here, first of all, the fundamental idea underlying the alleged Communism of the Bolsheviki. It is admittedly of a centralized, authoritarian kind. That is, it is based almost exclusively on governmental coercion, on violence. It is not the Communism of voluntary association. It is compulsory State Communism. This must be kept in mind in order to understand the method applied by the Soviet state to carry out such of its plans as may seem to be Communistic.

The first requirement of Communism is the socialization of the land and of the machinery of production and distribution. Socialized land and machinery belong to the people, to be settled upon and used by individuals or groups according to their needs. In Russia, land and machinery are not socialized but nationalized. The term is a misnomer, of course. In fact, it is entirely devoid of content. In reality, there is no such thing as national wealth. A nation is too abstract a term to “own” anything.

Ownership may be by an individual, or by a group of individuals; in any case by some quantitatively defined reality. When a certain thing does not belong to an individual or group, it is either nationalized or socialized. If it is nationalized, it belongs to the state; that is, the government has control of it and may dispose of it according to its wishes and views. But when a thing is socialized, every individual has free access to it and use it without interference from anyone.

In Russia, there is no socialization either of land or of production and distribution. Everything is nationalized; it belongs to the government, exactly as does the post office in America or the railroad in Germany and other European countries. There is nothing of Communism about it.

No more Communistic than the land and means of production is any other phase of the Soviet economic structure. All sources of existence are owned by the central government; foreign trade is its absolute monopoly; the printing presses belong to the state, and every book and paper issued is a government publication.

Labour MP Chris Bryant says Russia under Putin ‘manages to combine all the worst facets of communism and all the worst facets of rampant capitalism, all wrapped up inside a national security state’.
Get reaction from MPs to May Russia statement. https://t.co/12i6GCZhSXpic.twitter.com/AMcxPxn94N

In short, the entire country and everything in it is the property of the state, as in ancient days it used to be the property of the crown. The few things not yet nationalized, as some old ramshackle houses in Moscow, for instance, or some dingy little stores with a pitiful stock of cosmetics, exist on sufferance only, with the government having the undisputed right to confiscate them at any moment by simple decree.

Such a condition of affairs may be called state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic.

Let us now turn to production and consumption, the levers of all existence. Maybe in them we shall find a degree of Communism that will justify us in calling life in Russia Communistic, to some extent at least.

I have already pointed out that the land and the machinery of production are owned by the state. The methods of production and the amounts to be manufactured by every industry in each and every mill, shop and factory are determined by the state, by the central government—by Moscow—through its various organs.

Now, Russia is a country of vast extent, covering about one-sixth of the earth’s surface. It is peopled by a mixed population of 165,000,000. It consists of a number of large republics, of various races and nationalities, each region having its own particular interests and needs. No doubt, industrial and economic planning is vitally necessary for the well-being of a community.

True Communism – economic equality as between man and man and between communities — requires the best and most efficient planning by each community, based upon its local requirements and possibilities. The basis of such planning must be the complete freedom of each community to produce according to its needs and to dispose of its products according to its judgment: to change its surplus with other similarly independent communities without let or hindrance by any external authority.

Corbynov cannot condem Russia. Along with McDonnell and Milne, #jezzbollah is fully vested in Soviet communism. To attack Russia is to attack their own ideology https://t.co/5TybqI9lC9

That is the essential politico-economic nature of Communism. It is neither workable nor possible on any other isis. It is necessarily libertarian, Anarchistic.

There is no trace of such Communism — that is to say, of any Communism—in Soviet Russia. In fact, the mere suggestion of such a system is considered criminal there, and any attempt to carry it out is punished by death.

There are naive people who believe that at least some features of Communism have been introduced into the lives of the Russian people. I wish it were true, for that would be a hopeful sign, a promise of potential development along that line. But the truth is that in no phase of Soviet life, no more in the social than in individual relations has there ever been any attempt to apply Communist principles in any shape or form.

As I have pointed out before, the very suggestion of free, voluntary Communism is taboo in Russia and is regarded as counter-revolutionary and high treason against the infallible Stalin and the holy “Communist” Party.

The essence of Communism, even of the coercive kind, is the absence of social classes. The introduction of economic equality is its first step. This has been the basis of all Communist philosophies, however, they may have differed in other respects. The purpose common to all of them was to secure social justice, and all of them agreed that it was not possible without establishing economic equality.

Even Plato, in spite of the intellectual and moral strata in his Republic, provided for absolute economic equality, since the ruling classes were not to enjoy greater rights or privileges than the lowest social unit.

The Soviet Union was Communist.
Russia is not the Soviet Union.
Russia is not Communist
The Cold War was between The West and The Soviet’s Communism
Antifa, dress like Communists, Carry Communist flags, chant Communist lyrics, act like Communists but call us Russians?#RedNationpic.twitter.com/pQXYDY5tox

Even at the risk of condemnation for telling the whole truth, I must state unequivocally and unconditionally that the very opposite is the case in Soviet Russia. Bolshevism has not abolished the classes in Russia: it has merely reversed their former relationship.

As a matter of fact, it has multiplied the social divisions which existed before the Revolution.

The Bolshevik system of privilege and inequality was not long in producing its inevitable results. It created and fostered social antagonisms; it alienated the masses from the Revolution, paralysed their interest in it and their energies, and thus defeated all the purposes of the Revolution.

The same system of privilege and inequality, strengthened and perfected, is in force today.

It isn’t exactly pastoral. In fact, it’s quite filthy. But the pattern of taking shelter from the cold is reminiscent of an elementary school biology course, or a National Geographic wildlife special. In the place of nests, the homeless bury themselves in blankets and sleeping bags.

It would be nice to think that there was something seasonal about the reflex. Unfortunately, there isn’t. This is just about survival, and any allusions to the natural world are just that. Their improvised beds are just places to sleep and sit out the hopelessness of unemployment and inequality.

One can see persons living in the rough like this in the city throughout the warmer months. But they are often further out of sight, sleeping out in the open in the city’s parks. You only encounter the homeless in such high concentrations as this during the winter, when they must find warmth to survive.

This is of course not unique to Berlin. Most Western cities, particularly in the United States, have played host to large homeless communities for decades. But, for many, like the author of this column, they only come into regular contact with them during the winter months, because it gets too cold to cycle to work.

So overwhelming has the homeless presence been in my borough, Neukölln, this year, that I felt compelled to photograph it, for as long as I had to take the train to work. Now that the worst of the winter has passed, and I find it easier to cycle to my office again, I’ve begun looking at what I shot, and what it says to me.

I live in a tough neighbourhood. An in-demand and hip neighbourhood but an economically mixed, albeit crisis-ridden one, where tiny, dilapidated apartments that survived WWII run for half a million euros each, and a quarter of the stores are closed on the ironically-named main thoroughfare, Karl-Marx-Straße.

Yet everyone, the world over, wants to live here.

The reasons aren’t hard to surmise. The neighbourhood is heavily Middle Eastern and boasts some of the best Arab and Turkish restaurants in Europe. The grocery stores are cheap, and some of the bars get decent bands. And the culture is about as international as one can get in Europe.

English, Arabic and Turkish are the main languages spoken. German is almost entirely absent, save for the street signs and the newspaper stands. Berlin is every bit the diasporic city that London and Paris once were to immigrants from MENA region in the 1970s and 1980s.

Germans are fond of bashing the neighbourhood for its foreign character. But if you live there long enough, like I have, you begin to realise that this is Germany, albeit a highly cosmopolitan one. There may not be a lot of wealthy people in the area, but the desire for upward mobility is there. It will change.

That’s precisely what attracts so many poor people to the area. Not just the poverty-stricken, but the untouchables, like the persons in these photographs. Their helplessness is a mirror to the sense that people have that Berlin is headed somewhere and that certain neighbourhoods point that way more than others.

The borough’s diversity is not just a magnet for persons of different cultures, but classes too. Though immigrants tend to often be poorer than locals, the way that their poverty, as foreigners, and that of the homeless, tends to get intertwined yields a predictable picture, in which it is impossible to separate the two.

Immigrants are homeless too, if only temporarily so. In between countries and cultures, their displacement communicates, however awkwardly, a symbolic kinship with those who are economically adrift, ensuring a classist response to outsiders, as though they are no different from poverty-stricken locals.

When I see extreme examples of inequality, like my neighbours, and feel impelled to photograph them, these are the sorts of things I think about. I would like to imagine that their portraits of disenfranchisement are consciousness-raising if framed in the right context. They deserve to be represented. Their plight is not porn.

These photographs were also an experiment, of sorts, as they were exclusively shot on in RAW format, on my iPhone, and published immediately, as Tweets, thereafter. I thought of starting a Twitter account, with the title Berlin Precariat. But that would be too much, for me at least.

Better to shine a light on them, in a single blog entry like this, than to immerse oneself in a full-time social media account dedicated to the subject. After all, I live here and report on it every day. Albeit in my own small way, as a journalist en route to a publishing job in the morning.

Commentary by Joel Schalit. Photographs courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.

That being said, understanding the conflict solely through the lens of its socio-economic dimensions would overlook critical trends that can only be fully understood through an evaluation of sectarian dynamics. For example, the geography of early protests, the Syrian government’s ability to mobilize minorities and the limits of resistance against President Bashar al-Assad, Balanche said.

Syria Deeply spoke to Balanche, who recently authored a new study titled “Sectarianism in Syria’s Civil War,” about the limits of the sectarian frame, its potential for explanation and how the conflict has altered sectarian identities.

Syria Deeply: By focusing on sectarian dynamics, do we risk overlooking socio-economic or political factors that could also help explain the roots and causes of the Syrian conflict?

Fabrice Balanche: The Syrian conflict is not only sectarian. It should not be understood solely as a war between Shiites and Sunnis. It is also a class conflict between a wealthy ruling elite and marginalized communities. This is why early protests in 2011 started in peripheral areas that were neglected by the state for years.

A good example that shows that the conflict is not purely sectarian is that a lot of Sunni Syrian businessmen were opposed to the early demonstrations because they thought that this was harming the Syrian economy. So not all Sunnis were supportive of the revolution. Some of them, especially the bourgeoisie, wanted Assad to crack down more forcefully on the opposition. In this sense, the war is not a clean-cut sectarian conflict, as some people would like to make it seem. But the issue of sectarianism does help us look at things that have been overlooked when looking just at the socio-economic side of the conflict.

Syria Deeply: What are some of the things it can help explain?

Balanche: One thing sectarianism can help us understand is the early geography of protest in Syria. For example, you had significant protests in Sunni neighbourhoods in Daraa, but in nearby Suwayda, there weren’t as many protests because the Druze community was generally loyal to the regime. You also had virtually no protests in Alawite neighbourhoods in Homs or Latakia. Nor were there any demonstrations in the Christian parts of Aleppo, unless they were in support of the government. Meanwhile, Sunni areas were hotbeds for protest.

More importantly, it can help us understand one of the reasons why the revolution did not succeed: The revolt was mostly confined within the Sunni Arab community of Syria. By failing to incorporate other ethnosectarian groups such as the Christians, the Druze, the Alawites or the Kurds, the opposition inadvertently pushed these groups into the lap of the Syrian government. It basically gave Damascus a stronger mobilization capacity. The government could reach out to these minorities and tell them the state will protect them from the “terrorists” or the “Islamists.”

I’m not shia, but here is an example of the sectarianism that underpins much of the hatred surrounding my opposition to Us-backed death squads in Syria https://t.co/Zr9xPIt87G

Syria Deeply: Are the sectarian trends you observe in Syria relatively modern or are they more historically rooted?

Balanche: Sectarianism in Syria is not new. You can find traces of it from an inherited Ottoman millet system. In this sense, it’s historically rooted, of course. For example, sectarianism is embedded in the country’s political structure. Even though the Baathist system of governance is avowedly secular, administrative appointments and the distribution of administrative districts often privilege certain sects over others. Even military appointments and military promotions often privileged Alawite officers over Sunnis officers, for example. Also, in lower-class communities, inter-religious or inter-sectarian marriage is not extremely common. It is more common in higher social classes, but not among the poor.

Syria Deeply: Did the conflict harden these sectarian identities?

Balanche: Of course. The conflict reinforced people’s sectarian identity. You can see that in the proliferation of sectarian militias across the country. Here we are not just talking about Shiite militias like Hezbollah and Iranian-backed proxies, but also Christian militias in places like Wadi al-Nasara between Homs and Tartus and Ismaili militias in places like Salamiyah. You did not have these sectarian militias before the war.

Syria Deeply: Do you think this will translate into a new power structure in Syria?

Balanche: Today, everybody knows that the Baathist ideology is nothing more than a smokescreen. There is going to be a need for a new governance model for Syria because the state is weak and it will be very difficult for the state to come back as it was before 2011. Assad will have to share power with local authorities and different sectarian and tribal groups. We are going to have to wait before we can say definitively how this will translate into a new power structure. Especially because it is going to be difficult to acknowledge a sectarian distribution of power in the Syrian constitution. But even if it is not formally adopted, I think there will be a de facto distribution of power between rival sects.

Furthermore, the conflict has created more sect-homogeneous territory in places like Idlib and Aleppo, which are now even more predominantly Sunni than before. Because of the lack of trust between communities, many Christians and Alawites would be reluctant to return to these places, which would, in turn, reinforce sectarian differences.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This article originally appeared on Syria Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about the war in Syria, you can sign up to the Syria email list. Photograph courtesy of Beshr Abdulhadi. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Although the extent of the tariffs was not quite as broad as originally advertised, the exclusion of Canada and Mexico (from which the United States receives roughly 25% of its steel imports) made the whole thing more and not less confusing. The whole affair is emblematic of a regime in which discombobulated calculation is mixed with lashings of white male rage. In our spectacular civilisation, this works better than one might expect.

To understand this, it is important to keep the following premise in mind. The politics of the spectacle create a situation in which actions become disconnected from their consequences. In part, this an inescapable element of mass politics. The economics of populous industrial states are of such complexity that it is nearly impossible to connect discreet actions and their consequences. This has been the case since at least since the era of the New Deal, and arguably even before. As such, Mr. Trump’s actions (and not only with regard to tariffs) constitute a sort of political theatre, a performance whose goal is to convey an impression rather than a piece of calculated statecraft.

Trump has conned working class people into cuts in their Social Security, cuts in Medicaid, cuts in education for their children, to give himself and his ultra wealthy friends a tax break….Do you really think a billionaire Sociopath from New York wants to help you? pic.twitter.com/nrH6vouHYn

This is crucial, as it allows one to understand why Mr. Trump has been so willing to put aside one of the most widely held nostrums of American political life. In doing so he has managed to find one of those rare issues on which there is general agreement throughout the congressional delegations of both parties. The Democrats have been mostly silent on this issue. This is partly because the party leaders are aware of how little traction that devotion to free trade got them with the white working class (with whose support they are obsessed). But they are also content to allow their political opponents to stew in their own juices, hoping that this will cause further damage to the Republican brand.

For their part, the Republicans have limited themselves to expressing their concern but not actually doing anything. And why would they? For better or worse they are stuck with Mr. Trump. Having long ago made the calculation that, although he does some embarrassing things, having him in the White House allows them to achieve long-term goals (such as burning away the last shreds of the American welfare state) even at the risk of a little short-term pain. They know that should his reign prove too troublesome, they can always combine with the Democrats to get the necessary votes for impeachment. Until that point arrives, Mr. Trump can be counted on to undertake plenty of actions favourable to the financial position of those at the very top of the income distribution.

Given that, the Republican electoral base has not been significantly knocked off its stride by a conviction for assault. For Mr. Trump himself, this was yet another moment which illustrates the brilliance of the episode of Seinfeld in which the illocutionary force of the statement “these pretzels are making me thirsty” might have nothing to do with snack foods or thirst.

One may question the extent to which anyone in the White House knows anything about basic macroeconomics (limited to begin with and with the departure of Gary Cohn now infinitesimal). But perhaps someone there has registered the thought that, although trade wars tend to be a loser for everyone involved, that does not necessarily imply that everyone loses equally. If any serious thought has been devoted to the technical aspects of these questions around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the idea must be that even if we lose, others will lose more,

Some might object that Roy Moore didn’t win. But Moore retained roughly 60% of the Republican electorate which, in practical terms, gives one a pretty good idea of exactly how much weight Christian values carry among notionally evangelical voters. In all likelihood, Moore lost because a proportion of his voter base stayed home, not because they actually voted for his opponent (whose role in jailing child-murdering Klansmen probably counted against him with Alabama Republicans).

However, it is also clear that the actual consequences of the policy are less important than the act of enacting it. In part, this is a feature of large industrial democracies. Economies are complex, and even at the best of times, it is difficult to reliably associate policies and their consequences. Mr. Trump has grabbed this particular ball and run with it. The tariffs that he has put in place are really not about the economic effects that they will have. They are a function of perceived white male disempowerment, and a model of the sort of lashing out that this condition engenders.

Trump voters in the upper reaches of the income distribution can simply adjust their portfolios to account for the increased turbulence that trade wars might cause. For those further down, the consequences can be plausibly dissociated from Mr. Trump. He is about creating emotional responses, not crafting policies. As such, any losses suffered by those in Mr. Trump’s base can be chalked up to other externalities or put down to “if the leader only knew”.

The point of the tariffs is not protection of U.S. industries or of U.S. workers. That much is clear from the fact that Mr. Trump chose to exclude the sources of a quarter of steel imports from the restrictions. The point was that Mr. Trump has been seen to be taking some kind of punitive action against someone. It’s not clear exactly against whom. Mr. Trump likes to name enemies, and the particular enemy he seems to be interested in is China. China produces a lot of steel, but (comparatively speaking) they don’t export a lot of it the United States.

The point of Mr. Trump’s action is its implicit content, not its explicit policy implications. In a year (or two) when the content of these policies becomes manifest, the actions that gave birth to them will have long been pushed out of the news cycle by other moments of administration’s bumbling. But the facts of the matter are not the point. The point is that Mr. Trump is seen to be doing something. What he’s actually doing is a matter of no concern.

Photograph courtesy of Steve Baker. Published under a Creative Commons license.

But if you were to take some time to reflect on the deeper meaning of “American Pie,” McLean’s best-known song, and try transposing it to Israel, you would eventually realise that this concert, at this time in history, could not be in better sync with its setting.

The song, if you don’t remember it well, tells the story of a descent into chaos and disillusionment in the wake of “the day the music died”. But it tells this story entirely in code, never mentioning anyone by name. Given the details in each stanza, it seems pretty clear that McLean wants us to see the 1959 plane crash that took the lives of early rock-and-roll stars Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper as the beginning of this period and its end as the series of events that signalled the exhaustion of its utopian energies, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy to the scaling-up of the war in Indochina; from the rapid rise in drug abuse throughout the developed world to the violent turn in various protest movements; from the suppression of the Prague Spring to the brutality in Biafra and East Pakistan.

To be sure, McLean spent years avoiding an overt explanation of the song. And even when he did relent, he described it as an autobiographical account of his personal development during those years. In retrospect, it seems clear that he recognised intuitively that the best way of killing a compelling allegory is to “artist-splain” it. Letting people find what they want and need to find may detract from whatever message you wished to convey, but it guarantees that the impact of your work will expand to encompass different interpretations.

That’s why conservative Christians could argue that “American Pie” was a denunciation of the satanic influence on popular culture, while my mother, who was devoted to the same folk music tradition in which McLean began his career, could inform me that it was really about how Bob Dylan’s decision to go electric at Newport in 1965 led to a widening split between artists like Pete Seeger, fastidiously devoted to the Popular Front-style protest culture of the Depression, and the sort that the loud, irreverent rock-and-roll counterculture would soon produce. No matter how hard you examine the song’s lyrics, you can’t find adequate evidence to dismiss these readings outright or many others that have popped up over the years.

For the most part, though, these interpretations are much too narrow by themselves, reducing the song’s multivalence to something deceptively simple. The best know parody of McLean’s masterpiece, Weird Al Yankovic’s 1999 song “The Saga Begins” does a far better job, surprisingly. By recontextualising “American Pie” in relation to the Star Wars franchise’s New Age mythology, it provides the raw material for discerning a political substrate in the lyrics. Anticipating the story arc of the so-called prequel trilogy, they implicitly connect Annikin Skywalker’s impending journey to the dark side, his transformation into Darth Vader, with that of the United States itself.

Annikin is blessed with immense potential but struggles to realise it because his arrogance and impatience are refracted through a reservoir of wounded resentment. In the second and third films of the trilogy, he increasingly comes to feel that traditional institutions — the Senate, the Jedi – are holding him back and seeks a path that will make it easier for him to achieve maximum power.

To anyone who knows the history of the United States, this plot neatly distils its transformation from a provincial backwater into the world’s greatest power over the century between the Mexican-American War and World War II. But it provides an even more apt précis of Israel’s development, particularly the pervasive sense of having-been-wronged and concomitant desire to exact revenge that animates the nation’s history. The reason why the Jedi Council refuses to train young Annikin is that its members, particularly Yoda, sense that he is holding on too fiercely to the feeling of having grown up as a slave and will possibly find it difficult to let go of other injuries in the future (as soon proves to be the case).

What does this have to do with “American Pie,” which looks back nostalgically on a Golden Age before the music died? Both the United States and Israel are unusually fixated on the time when they came into being, the founding fathers and mothers who determined their future course. These early years were not a time of great power, relatively speaking, yet they now bask in the warm glow of righteousness. Although ethically problematic actions made survival possible — the forced displacement of native peoples, first and foremost — the conviction that there was no other choice continues to justify them in the minds of most citizens.

In the case of Israel, however, this parallel is further accentuated by the fact that perception of the nation’s place in history was radically transformed during the 1960s. The apparent loss of innocence that McLean chronicles corresponds rather nicely with the aftermath of the Six Day War when Israel could no longer fall back on the image of the plucky underdog. But here’s the thing: The cold, hard truth is that the perception of what preceded that sudden shift is largely the product of delusion. If there was innocence lost in the nation’s history, it wasn’t after it had matured into a regional power, but at the very beginning, with decisions that have haunted it ever since.

The same holds true for rock and roll, really, and along intriguingly similar lines. That Golden Age that “American Pie” directs our attention towards, before the fall into knowledge, was only possible because of a foundational theft, that transfer of cultural resources that made African-American culture palatable to middle-class whites.

In a sense, then the positing of 3 February 1959 as “the day the music died” functions as a way of whitewashing history since that music had been suffering long before mainstream American society acknowledged its birth. And when the United States’ behaviour as a superpower during the Eisenhower years is taken into account, the idea — though assiduously promoted in Star Wars creator George Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti and a host of other texts, including the television show Happy Days and a spate of back-to-basics records that responded to the perceived excesses of the counterculture — that this period was somehow “innocent” seems even more problematic.

A great many people are still interested in debating what happened during the late 1960s, as the numerous fiftieth-anniversary celebrations scheduled for this year are sure to forcefully demonstrate. Some wish to redeem that tumultuous time’s revolutionary promise. Others continue decades-worth of efforts to undo its cultural and political legacy. But almost everyone seems to go along with the notion that it was a time of excess, standing in sharp contrast to the relative probity that preceded it.

In this regard, the ground has long since been ceded to those who wish to disentangle the idea of progress from what was once its leading edge, either by reframing it in purely economic or technological terms — though there aren’t any moon landings coming up — or by insisting that it’s politically counterproductive to think in terms of progress at all.

Bearing all this in mind, it could be very worthwhile to take a closer look at the role nostalgia culture currently plays in reinforcing reactionary political behaviour. Many Baby Boomers have retired and a lot more will do so in the next few years, where their numbers will continue to distort demography, as they’ve been doing since the 1960s. There are lot of them, in other words, which means that the increasing conservatism that senior citizens tend to display will have a greater impact than ever.

One perverse consequence of this asymmetry is that artists like Don McLean will continue to get gigs as long as they are capable of playing because they help to ratify fellow senior citizens’ self-conception as people who experienced the most radical time ever and learned lessons they need to impart to each generation that followed theirs.

Crucial to proponents of this reverse ageism is the conviction that they made the perilous passage from innocence to experience, bringing the world gifts that everyone still benefits from. Perhaps what is needed, then, is an approach to cultural and political analysis that demystifies the before-and-after logic of such beliefs. The 1960s didn’t span a loss of innocence; rather, they distracted people sufficiently so that they would fail to recognise that they never had much innocence to lose.

That’s the lesson of “American Pie” we can glean from reading the song, as Walter Benjamin famously advised, “against the grain”. It sure beats watching a geriatric Don McLean sing his most famous song for fans who would rather validate their youthful struggle than do anything to transpose it into the future.

Commentary by Charlie Bertsch. Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. Published under a Creative Commons license.

There is plenty of gloom and doom on the left. Fascism is around every corner, it’s even under the bed. Victory is short-lived or impossible. Yet somehow there are gains every so often. But this misses the point.

The right lives to lower expectations. We’re supposedly in the best of all possible worlds, and any attempt to improve it will inexorably lead to totalitarianism. So we just have to expect our lot in life. It’s our own fault after all. This is the core of the right’s message to the world.

“What hurts helps, what helps hurts!” far-right American journalist John Derbyshire reminds his readers. And this might just be the best way to sum up the conservative outlook.

Recovering Thatcherite John Gray warns us not to have too many big ideas because ideas lead to the gulag. It’s better to invest your politics in unthinking gut instinct, common sense and reality. Theories are dangerous, yet are inescapable. The right has its own theories and ideology. It just prefers to disavow the concepts.

This is the complete opposite of the left, where the utopian impulse is strong. Progressives wants to remake the world. This desire is what the reactionary pessimists want to extinguish. Revolutionary waves sweep away the limits of old thought. The theory itself is often a source of strength and even clarity.

Conservatives feel the need to raise strong barriers to critical theories because it doesn’t want its institutions and assumptions examined. After all, you can’t tear things down if you don’t think there is anything wrong with them in the first place.

No wonder Big Tobacco’s favourite philosopher Roger Scruton preaches pessimism. Scruton advocates lower expectations, less theory, less planning and more prudent hopes based on what has come before us. This is an old story really, but there has been a new turn in recent years.

Scruton, Gray and Derbyshire are a part of a set of reactionary pessimists. We might add paleoconservatives Peter Hitchens and Pat Buchanan to the same list. Hitchens calls himself Britain’s ‘obituarist’ against waves of mass immigration and a left-wing cultural putsch. Just as Buchanan bemoans the coming demise of ‘white America’.

As Peter Hitchens outlines the Conservative Party is not truly conservative anymore.Its policies are that of Social Democrats.Mass immigration,gay marriage,high borrowing/public spending,soft on law and order-not anywhere near conservative values.

There is a certain kind of cultural conservative that sees the left as triumphant everywhere because the social and moral battles of the 1960s and 1970s cannot be restaged. The right lost many of these battles in much of the Western world. This has left some old-fashioned reactionaries in a state of mourning.

Yet these right-wing stalwarts are no fans of neoliberalism. Many of these conservatives deplore globalism almost as much as they hate Marxism. Buchanan pioneered ‘America First’ populism long before Trump ever ran for high office. It was based on a full-hearted rejection of free trade and open borders, and the embrace of the nation-state and its sovereignty. Others go even further.

When it comes to the economy Hitchens has said that he is for a robustly social democratic model, which would include a safety net and universal healthcare. It would also include strong employment rights and social housing. He opposes the right to buy scheme which has wiped out so many council houses and inflated the housing market. On top of this, Hitchens routinely criticised the privatisation of the railways.

Hitchens sees the United Kingdom as being threatened by a leftist cultural putsch against the vestiges of an organic social order. However, it is very clear that he is no friend of right-wing politics. He speaks of Tories with nothing but disdain. Hitchens even seems to respect the radicals of the left much more for their honesty.

On an ABC panel with Dan Savage and Germaine Greer, Hitchens was asked what he thinks of Tony Abbott. He immediately laid into the Australian premier, deeming him a ‘fake conservative’ for his phoney moralism, his pro-market economic agenda and connections with Rupert Murdoch. Hitchens wants nothing more than the British Conservative Party to be annihilated.

It’s no coincidence that Hitchens was once a Trotskyist. He still speaks in hyper-sectarian tones, fixating on small differences and itching to fight with his own side.

I’ve been saying for ages that Peter Hitchens was spot on when he said the current crop of Tories are basically Blairites.

This is where traditionalism becomes a form of ultra-orthodoxy. The cultural right may be so reactionary it’s actually subversive to mainstream conservatism. The battle is over the future of society.

Just like Hitchens, Buchanan and Derbyshire loathe America’s Republican establishment. They embrace Trump as a battering ram against cultural liberalism and globalisation. Ironically, the reactionary pessimists might be more dangerous to the right than the left. Conservatism has always been a tension between market liberalism and the bedrock of traditions, culture and authority.

What happens when the former set of social forces want to overturn the latter? In the end, cultural conservatives might end up becoming ultra-rightists – so reactionary, they undermine the politics they seek to advance.

Photograph courtesy of IDJ Photography. Published under a Creative Commons license.

The global character of this sameness is increasingly apparent. In between the overwhelming reach of news broadcasters, and the lack of diversity in content sharing, the media we consume is instantly identifiable across the world and a part of everyone’s news experience.

The idea of citizen journalists breaking through with truly local content is increasingly a thing of the past. It’s gone back to being niche, just like local newspapers and community broadcasters used to be. The only difference is that those outlets are now individuals, mostly, not news outlets.

Long gone are the days when we could consistently go to regional outlets, exclusively focused on our backyards. We go to our friends on Facebook for that information instead. While news can and does still get through, there’s a narrative that’s often missing, that might help us frame current events as something more than just the immediate.

The consequences of such changes are huge, particularly when it comes to big stories reported on everywhere, like refugees. Few persons would argue that they’re not relevant. The Middle East and Africa remain engulfed by violence war, and there are more people on the move around the world than at any time since the Second World War.

The problem is that news is viewed as entertainment. Whether it’s being delivered by someone we went to college with or reporters with journalism school degrees, we want it to always be new, and to not so consistently negative. If all we do is hear about upheaval, what’s the point? Something must be wrong with the media for so consistently focusing on it.

This kind of thinking is especially symptomatic of those who are wont to criticise journalism focused on social and humanitarian issues. Why obsess over issues like homelessness when they’re so common? We might encounter it every day, but when it comes to the media we consume, we have the ability to bypass it in favour human interest stories and music reviews, for example.

Ideal and real Israel. Tel Aviv, August 2017.

The same is true of refugees, especially where I’ve called home – Israel, of which I am a citizen – and Germany, where I live. Both places are iconographic destinations for asylum seekers. Both are also heavily criticised for the ways in which they’ve treated migrants. Germany less so than Israel, which makes more of an explicit point of refusing to take in non-Jewish migrants of colour.

From one mother to another. Tel Aviv, March 2018.

Though a topic with international news broadcasters the last fortnight, the Israeli government’s decision to begin deporting the 50,000 thousand African refugees in the country has been notable for its lack of headline status. The story gets covered, but it is treated with less importance than other migrant stories set in Europe and the United States.

It isn’t so much that it’s a less sexy story than that of Palestinian teen protestor Ahed Tamimi, for example. The issue is that anything less than fully tabloid is simply too depressing to promote. Why commission yet another story on a first world country refusing to take responsibility for ethnic migrants from the global south? Israel’s story is just more of the same, albeit more complex, due to the Holocaust.

It makes you want to find ways to capture the refugees as you might see them – vulnerable people subject to humiliating circumstances, with nothing to look forward to. In a part of the world renown for its nonstop violence and deep-seated hatreds, what will become of these people once they come to terms with the fact no one cares for them or their survival?

One can’t help but think about the ruthlessness of Syrian government forces in Ghouta, or the savagery of a terrorist group like Daesh. They’re not just reflections of a proclivity for sadism. They’re consequences of their context, of people pushed so far to the extreme by cruelty, they have no compunction about gassing unarmed civilians or eating the heart of an enemy corpse on live TV.

With such widely documented acts of barbarity the norm these days, who cares about Africans working as dishwashers in Tel Aviv? They’ve become invisible, particularly to Israelis, many of whom have a hard time distinguishing them from ethnic Ethiopian Jews, even though to the educated eye, Eritreans and Sudanese can look quite different.

The photographs in this article are intended to break that spell, if only for the journalist who took them. With African immigrants increasingly common to Israel’s cities, it’s easy to pass them by and not notice what it is about them and their surroundings that speaks to the crisis they live with, particularly at the present juncture.

It’s an ideal subject to start out this new column with, as much of what I shoot, as a journalist are people forced to the margins. The point, or so I understand it, is to represent them.

Poverty is tiring. Tel Aviv, August 2017.

Commentary by Joel Schalit. Photographs courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.